calendario eventi  :: 

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10/6/2010

Two exhibitions

Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin

Gordon Matta-Clark - Office Baroque

Coinciding with this year’s second Gallery Weekend Berlin, Galerie Thomas Schulte will be hosting an opening of the exhibition "Office Baroque", a documentary of Gordon Matta-Clark’s spectacular project in Antwerp in 1977. The opening will run from 4 to 10 pm on Friday, June 11.

"Office Baroque" marks the sixth exhibition that since 1994 the gallery will be showing with the New York born artist, Gordon Matta-Clark: previous exhibitions include "Bingo", "The City as Resource", "The Complete Films", and "Notebook Drawings".

Gordon Matta-Clark counts as one of the most influential artists of his generation in the 1970’s. Following his architecture studies at Cornell University, Matta-Clark delved into his work with investigating alternative drafts to conventional architecture and the intense empathy towards aspects of the urbanized lebensraum. And so, through exact, dissecting observation and with an air of modern archaeology, a new form of sculpture was born. Furthermore, Matta-Clark’s inscriptions and inci-sions into sculptural realms of already existing architectural objects became his trademark. In this respect it is fascinating with what enormous dynamics and ingenious acquisition of space he encroached on the buildings and how important his sketches became as fields of practice and experimentation.

"Office Baroque" is one of the most striking projects of the deceased artist. In 1977, allied with leading Belgian curator and museum-founder, Florent Bex, Matta-Clark was able to secure an abandoned office building in Antwerp and tactically cut pieces out of the roof, the walls, and ceilings, incising a spatial drawing into the building from top to bottom.

Some of the cut-outs became sculptures in their own right, while the resulting spatial relations in the building were documented on photographs. This photographic documentation was the premise for Matta-Clark’s typical colligated Cibachromes that build the core also of this exhibition. In addition there are significant sketches and a documentary film that depicts the project’s development.

The exhibition was enabled through close cooperation with Florent Bex and consists almost exclusively of loaned works from public and private collections in Belgium as well as various pieces from the artist’s estate.

Gordon Matta-Clark was born in New York in 1943. The architect and conceptual artist studied at Cornell University and the Sorbonne in Paris.
Important solo exhibitions include the Paris Biennale (1975), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (1977; 1978; 1985), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1986), and the Reina Sofia in Madrid (1997; 2006). Notable group exhibitions count the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1971), the Documenta in Kassel (1972; 1977), the P.S.1 MoMA in New York (1976), the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Francisco (1993; 1999), the Hamburger Kunsthalle (2000), the Tate Modern in London (2005), and the Musée National d’Art Modern in Paris (2005). The artist has received numerous grants and awards including the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1977) and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Theodoron (1975). Gordon Matta-Clark died in 1978 in New York.

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Alice Aycock - The Wonderful Pig of Knowledge

Coinciding with this year’s second Gallery Weekend Berlin, Galerie Thomas Schulte will open its presentation of the mechanical object "A Salutation to The Wonderful Pig of Knowledge" by American sculptor Alice Aycock on Friday, June 11, from 4 to 10 pm. The exhibition is Alice Aycock’s first exhibition in Germany in more than 20 years.

Alice Aycock is one of the most influential and inventive artists of her time. Starting her career in the lively art scene of New York in the early seventies she must be seen at the helm of a number of women artists breaking the lines of male domination in visual arts. At the same time she belongs to a young generation of artists like Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson who question and paraphrase the technological and positivistic attitude that western civilisation had taken on. They try to open up an alternative view of the world beyond that, while at the same time dealing with the traditions of architecture, science, and the arts.

After her beginnings in a rather Land Art-oriented approach that mostly used natural materials like wood, stone, and earth from which she would construct architectural or semi-architectural objects and environments, Aycock moved to more technical sculptures and apparati of which her work A Salutation to The Wonderful Pig of Knowledge is a prime example. The work was conceived and fully designed during a short stay of the artist in Berlin in 1984. Within the oeuvre it belongs to a group of savage machines or motorized blade machines that Aycock had begun to create in the early eighties when she became interested in inventions, tool-making, and the Industrial Revolution. She then thought about urban decay, machines, magic, science, and the remnants of things people carelessly throw away. Particularly strange machinery that created apparitions, had then caught her interest and made her build machines that referred to alchemical and chemical apparatus and kitchen equipment as well as a lot of references to electricity and early science experiments.

A Salutation to The Wonderful Pig of Knowledge is a fantastic amalgamation of machine and animal, an object that is architectural and sculptural as well as mental and emotional. Although it offers some clear clues, the viewer hopes in vain to find a specific message or meaning, for Aycock’s work is characterised by a paradox multipolarity, identified by herself as schizophrenic. The sculpture is such indicative of the artist’s chimerical nature of free associations, her continued need to escape the confines of official interpretations, and her true delight in the disjunctive flights of the imagination as well as the metamorphoses such processes can effect.

The primary source for the sculpture was an illumination of a peacock in an early Spanish manuscript form 945 that made Aycock speculate about the metaphorical and symbolic image of the peacock, being s symbol of the glittering night sky in Eastern cultures, a metaphor for purity in Christian medieval view or for apotheosis in Roman times. At the same time the sculpture tells about a dream that the artist has since childhood and alludes to satyr Marsyas who lost a musical contest with Apollo and was flayed alive by the sun god. But the work also suggests affiliation with Icarus who flew too close to the sun and thus fell into the sea when the wax adhering feathers to this wings melted.

These allusions and many more suggest to read Alice Aycock’s sculpture as a modern allegory of humanity’s hubris on a par with Marsyas’ challenge and Icarus’ flight, while its greed for both information and understanding assumes the far reaches of Faust’ pact with the Devil.

Alice Aycock was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, lives and works in New York City. Her work was presented in solo shows a.o. at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1980). Major group exhibitions include the 1979 and 1981 Whitney Biennials in NYC and The Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. In Germany Aycock was first presented at Documenta 6 (1977) and in 1983-84 in a comprehensive travelling exhibition at Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, and Skulpturenmuseum, Marl.

Opening June 11, from 4 to 10 pm

Galerie Thomas Schulte
Charlottenstrasse 24 - Berlin
Free admission

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